“The links that weld humanity together are such curius ones, wove out of so many strands, visible and invisible, strong as steel and relentless as death, and that reach out so fur, so fur on every side, how can any one tell whether a great strain and voyalence inflicted on the lowest link of that chain may not shatter and corrode and destroy the very highest and brightest one?
“The hull chain of humanity is held in one hand, and we are bein’ pulled along by that mighty, inexorable hand into we know not what.
“The link that shines the brightest to-day may be rusty to-morrow, the strongest one may be torn in pieces by some sudden and voyalent wrench, or some slow, wearin’ strain comin’ from beneath.
“How can we tell, and how dast we say that a evil that affects one class of humanity can never reach us—how do we know it won’t?”
“Because we do know it!” hollered Josiah. “I know it is jest as I tell you, that that dumb nigger question can’t never touch us anyway. I’ve said it, and I’ll stick to it.”
But I still felt real eloquent, and I went right on and drew some metafors, as I most always do when I get to goin’, I can’t seem to help it.
Sez I, “The temperate man may say the liquor question will never affect him, but some day he gathers his sober children about him, and finds one is missin’—the pet of them all driven down in the street to death by a drunken driver.
“A Christian woman sez, ‘This question of Social Purity cannot affect me, for I am pure and come from a pure ancestry.’ But there comes a day when she finds the lamb of her flock overtaken and slain by this evil she thought could never touch her.
“The rich capitalist sets back in his luxurious chair and reads of the grim want that is howlin’ about the hovels of the poor laborers, the deaths by exposure and starvation. The graves of these starved victims seem fur off to him. They can never affect him, he thinks, so fur is he removed in his luxurious surroundin’s from all sights of woe and squalor.
“But even as he sets there thinkin’ this, in his curtained ease, a bullet aimed by the gaunt, frenzied hand of some starvin’ child of labor strikes his heart, and he finds in death the same level that the victims of want found by starvation.